Each week, I send out a story via my email newsletter. Each story is around 1000 words, sometimes less, sometimes more. The stories are in a variety of genres: supernatural, thriller, sci-fi, horror, and sometimes romance, and all of my stories typically feature a gay protagonist.
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This is story number 42 of the series. Enjoy!
Between the Pages
The moment Elias stepped into Dorian’s Books, the air shifted. Not just the hush of dust and parchment, but something deeper—a pulse, almost sentient, as if the shop had inhaled.
It smelled like old paper, yes, but also candle wax, lavender, and something stranger: ozone after lightning. He stood still for a beat, the door creaking shut behind him, and felt the uncanny tug of familiarity. As if he belonged here. As if he’d always belonged.
Elias was new to the shop, barely a week into his apprenticeship. Young, whip-smart, and cursed with hair that defied gravity, he had a habit of reading five books at once and forgetting where he left his coffee. Dorian, the enigmatic owner with silver-threaded hair and eyes like winter, had taken him in with little explanation. Just a nod, a key, and an expectation: “The books will show you what you need to know.”
He spent hours shelving books by candlelight, brushing dust from spines like artifacts. Customers came and went, each seemingly drawn to a specific book as if by fate. And Elias couldn’t ignore the way Dorian moved through the stacks—quiet, purposeful, always just out of reach. Sometimes he caught Dorian watching him. Not in a predatory way, but like one might watch a dream taking shape.
It was on the seventh day—a day where the rain tapped the windows like an impatient ghost—that Elias discovered the attic.
He was dusting the upper shelves, cursing a persistent cobweb, when a shelf creaked open just an inch too far. Behind it: an alcove. Hidden, forgotten, alive with static. Inside lay a single book. Leather-bound, cracked, and humming.
He shouldn’t have touched it. But of course he did.
The cover writhed beneath his fingertips. Symbols shifted like snakes under water. When he opened it, the text shimmered, each character burning faintly gold. And the story—if it could be called that—was unlike any he’d ever read.
It was a history. Of two souls.
Of a knight and his liege. A poet and his muse. A healer and a mage. Lifetime after lifetime, tethered by longing. Bound by fate. And in every chapter: Elias.
And Dorian.
He read until his eyes ached and the lamps burned low. The words unfolded not just on the page, but in his mind. He saw flashes. A battlefield soaked in fog. A garden drenched in moonlight. A kiss shared in the shadow of a burning city.
Strange things began to happen.
He saw his reflection pause a beat too long. He woke from dreams with the taste of salt and blood in his mouth. Whispers trailed him through the aisles when no one else was there. The shop grew colder, the lights flickering more often.
And still, he kept reading.
When Elias next saw Dorian, everything was different.
He noticed the way their fingers brushed when passing a book. The pause before Dorian spoke his name. The sorrow behind his smile.
One late afternoon, they sat together in the shop’s reading nook, the light golden through the windows. Elias dared to ask, “Have we met before? In another life?”
Dorian studied him for a long moment. “Would it frighten you if I said yes?”
Elias shook his head. “I think I’d be relieved.”
“You found the book, then.”
“Yes, what is it?”
“The Codex Animarum,” Dorian whispered. “I wondered when you’d find it.”
“You knew?” Elias felt reality shift beneath his feet. “You knew about this book?”
“I placed it there.” Dorian’s fingers traced the cover’s symbols, which now pulsed with soft light. “Three lifetimes ago, when I first learned to work the deeper magics. I bound our story into vellum and ink, thinking to preserve what we had before…” His voice caught. “Before I lost you again.”
The rational part of Elias’s mind gibbered protests. Magic wasn’t real. Reincarnation was wishful thinking. People didn’t live multiple lifetimes loving the same soul.
But his heart knew better. His heart had recognized Dorian the moment he’d walked through that door.
“Show me,” Elias said.
They spread the book across Dorian’s mahogany desk, its pages falling open as if eager to share their secrets. The script was impossibly beautiful—each letter formed from what looked like captured moonlight, flowing across parchment that felt warm as living skin.
Dorian’s hand covered Elias’s as they turned the first page. The moment their fingers touched, the shop around them dissolved.
—1547, Scotland—
Sir Elias knelt in the dirt, his sword raised in defense of his fallen lord. Lord Dorian’s golden hair was matted with blood, his breathing shallow. The enemy circled like wolves.
“I won’t leave you,” Elias vowed, though the odds were impossible.
Dorian’s hand found his. “In the next life, beloved. Find me in the next life.”
—1823, London—
Elias set down his quill, ink still wet on the love sonnet. Through his window, he could see Dorian’s silhouette in the house across the square. Tomorrow, Dorian would marry the woman his family had chosen. Tonight was all they had.
The consumption that wracked Elias’s lungs would claim him before winter’s end. But these poems would survive. Somewhere, somehow, their love would survive.
—1943, Paris—
They ran through streets slick with rain and Nazi searchlights. Elias clutched the stolen documents while Dorian led them through alleys he knew like prayer. Behind them, boots pounded and voices shouted.
“The safe house is just ahead,” Dorian panted.
The bullet found him before he could finish the sentence.
The visions faded, leaving them gasping in the bookshop’s familiar warmth. Elias’s cheeks were wet with tears he didn’t remember shedding.
“Every time,” Dorian said softly, “we find each other. And every time, the world tears us apart.”
“But not this time.” Elias’s voice was fierce with certainty. “This time we know. This time we can fight.”
Dorian’s smile was heartbreaking in its tenderness. “My brave knight. Still ready to battle impossible odds.”
Their kiss, days later, felt like remembering something his bones already knew.
From then on, they were inseparable. Weeks and them months passed with them laughing over dusty tomes. Whispering incantations in candlelight. Rediscovering themselves, again. The shop became a cocoon of warmth and wonder.
But the book had not finished.
One night, as Elias turned its final pages, the glow flickered. Shadows dripped from the margins. A warning revealed itself:
“He follows. He always follows. One must be sacrificed.”
They both felt it. A coldness in the shop. Lamps sputtering. A presence watching.
Dorian grew quieter. More distracted. He began locking certain rooms, guarding texts with wards. Elias dreamt of black smoke and screaming stars. One morning, he woke with scratches on his arms he didn’t remember receiving.
They searched, together, through archives and hidden grimoires. And found it: a ritual. Ancient. Dangerous. Capable of binding the darkness—but at a cost.
Dorian refused to say what the cost was.
The night of the ritual, the moon rose like an open eye. The shop was silent but tense, like breath before a scream.
They lit the candles. Drew the circle. Spoke the words.
And the dark came.
It poured in like ink, coalescing into a figure with hollow eyes and clawed hands. It lunged.
Elias raised a trembling arm, but Dorian was faster. A wall of searing light shot up between them.
Magic cracked the air. Shelves exploded. Books flew. Elias fought beside him, spells leaping from his lips he hadn’t known he knew. Dorian, graceful and fierce, moved like someone who had done this before.
The entity spoke in a voice like broken glass. “You were mine before time. You cannot escape me again.”
Elias felt his limbs freeze, but Dorian’s hand gripped his, anchoring him. “Don’t listen. You’re stronger than he is. You always were.”
With a cry, Elias summoned a surge of golden fire. It caught the shadow in the chest, staggering it. Dorian moved in sync, casting a binding weave of light and memory.
And then, with a scream that shattered every window in the shop, the entity vanished.
But so did Dorian.
He knelt, gasping, eyes flickering. His body was beginning to fade.
“No,” Elias said. “No, no, no.”
“The ritual needed a price,” Dorian whispered, his voice dissolving like fog. “I gave it mine.”
Elias grasped at him, but his hands passed through light.
“Please don’t go,” Elias begged.
Dorian smiled. “We always find each other.”
Elias’s heart shattered into a million pieces. He clung to Dorian, desperately trying to hold onto the fading warmth of his love. But it was no use. Dorian’s body dissolved into shimmering particles, leaving Elias alone in the moonlit room.
He was gone.
Ashes. Silence. Rain against the windows.
Elias collapsed to the floor and screamed until his voice broke. He stayed there until morning.
As the first rays of dawn pierced through the windows, Elias realized that the hidden book had not just revealed their past lives but had orchestrated their reunion. It was a cruel twist of fate, a love story written in the stars, destined to end in heartbreak.
With a heavy heart, Elias returned the book to its hiding place, vowing to honor Dorian’s sacrifice by protecting the shop and the magic it held.
Weeks passed. Customers returned. The shelves restocked themselves. But nothing filled the space where Dorian had stood.
Elias spoke to him sometimes, into the silence. He began writing spells in the margins of books, hoping Dorian might read them. Sometimes, late at night, a candle would flare without reason. A book would open to a page Elias hadn’t chosen.
One evening, while closing up, a volume fell from the highest shelf. He picked it up.
Dorian’s handwriting, elegant and unmistakable, sprawled across the inside cover:
“Soon.”
Elias smiled through tears.
Because stories, like love, never really end. They just wait for someone to read them again.
THE END